Java 1.5 has been a slight disappointment for me. Well, perhaps
I should clarify that. There is some great stuff in 1.5. I've
previously mentioned that I think the improved monitoring is
fabulous. The way MBeans are just all automatically supported
by jconsole is pure excellence. It's great that Doug Lea's
concurrent stuff was pushed into the core, top class multi-threading
support is increasingly one of the most essential requirements
for any language. And the performance is better, garbage
collection is improved, ergonomics is a great idea.

So why am I disappointed? In a word, bugs. We are up to 1.5.0_09.
That's update 9 after the full release. Two years after the full
release. And I'm still hitting critical JVM bugs. I didn't even
start testing 1.5 for production systems until update _05, and
even that had to be stalled because of critical bugs that caused
our systems to crash regularly. By _09 I'm now using 1.5 in
production, but still seeing critical bugs causing the
occasional crash.

Well you might spring to Sun's defence and say that any complex
system is going to have some bugs. And I run some extremely
challenging Java applications that stresses Java in all sorts of
different ways, so perhaps I should expect to hit some bugs.
And I agree with you. Hitting the bugs is not what has disappointed
me. No, I'm disappointed because almost all these critical bugs
were already identified in the Bug parade, identified as critical,
and a fair few of them have been fixed. Only not in 1.5. They are
being fixed in 1.6. Or several 1.5 versions after they are fixed
they got rolled in to a later 1.5 update.

It's all very well to focus on the next "full" release. But we need
the most stable JVM possible in production. If these sorts of bugs
are not rolled in to a stable current JVM release, then we aren't
getting the most stable Java system possible, and eventually that
could cause a loss in confidence in Java. And that's not something
that I want to see.

Now on to our newsletter. And we have
Javva the Hutt continuing to tell us all about what he was doing
while he was away. (For those of you who don't know Javva, or want a
reminder, we've added a page for you to access all his old columns
here.)
And of course we have our other news, this months selected articles,
tools, and of course
our many new extracted performance tips